Weekly Reflections

No use talking to the coffin as some do. We talk to ourselves. We say out loud what we may have never put into words. Or perhaps what we often said out loud. We consolidate our group or family memory. We speak a little song of praise, we say something good, we bless (the meanings eulogy derives from).

We also speak to God if we are believers. Because we know that the things we remember are also blessings received from him by his grace (Paul and Peter knew that). God the father richly blessed my father. Not only in the era and location in which he lived, and the genes he was given, but by his Spirit, through his Word and in his church.

Funerals are not only about eulogies of course. Funerals are about “reverently disposing of the mortal body” as one of our services has it. At the Reformation a major change was introduced into the Anglican funeral service by Archbishop Cranmer.

No longer was it focussed on the soul’s passage through the afterlife (purgatory and the like). Now it was a proclamation of “...the sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life through our Lord Jesus Christ, who shall change our [weak] body, that it may be like unto his glorious body...”.

Aahh that is deep, is it not? That this death, and this dead person, their dead body, might be transformed, changed, made like the glorious body of the Lord Jesus. What will that be like? What kind of experience is this? It makes you want to see, to get there, to be part of the glory of the completed human. To make sure you don’t miss out.

Dale